Technical Debt Has Taken Over The Economy
The term “technical debt” usually refers to shortcuts or suboptimal approaches during software development. It manifests itself as poorly designed code, lack of documentation and outdated components. While properly written code and documentation are timeless, components and approaches are not. Software and its components can become technical debt over time. Since the software industry flourished in the 1980s, around 40 years ago, it is a relatively new phenomenon that we encounter completely outdated software concepts, processes and systems now.
Technical debt can be small software components, libraries, code or algorithms that are simply made obsolete by newer knowledge in computer science. Beside software code or components, that can also apply to entire system designs and architectures. In fact, in todays world, there are numerous cases of entire industries relying on processes, technology, communication protocols and other technology components that can be defined as technical debt. There’s no industry on the planet that currently does not suffer from technical debt, outdated processes and systems. Outdated systems doesn’t mean the software has reached its end of life, but merely the processes and algorithms inside it have.
